Interdisciplinary catalogue of criteria (ICC)

Objectives
The interdisciplinary catalogue of criteria (ICC) will be a toolbox of criteria and methods to make the basic steps for development, planning and management processes more efficient and appropriate to multi-dimensional interrelated problems of the development and management of urban green spaces. The toolbox maintains a set of criteria and methods to support the description of green space objects, problem structuring, planning and decision-making processes on the level of the whole city / urban region and on the level of particular urban green spaces.

Methodology and description of work
The toolbox of criteria and methods addresses the multi-disciplinary questions in the planning and management processes of urban green spaces. Therefore, the ICC has to offer selected criteria to describe the present status. Furthermore, it provides guides and methods how to evaluate the present status, define desired planning targets, consider disturbing impacts or new opportunities, define strategic paths for the development and planning of actions to achieve a holistic view.

The ICC will be a:

1. a tool to analyse the green structure of a city / urban region (city profile)
2. a tool to evaluate particular urban green spaces (green space evaluation)
3. a set of methods to improve the development, planning and management of urban green spaces (methods for improvement).

The elaboration of each topic generally follows a typical path of worksteps. During the course of the working steps different methods, e.g. criteria matrices, cross impact matrices, causal loop diagramming are applied.
Single worksteps are developed by scientist partners (from the ecological, economic, social and planning point of view), discussed and refined in the consortium with the help of communication using the project's Intranet capabilities. On several workshops and during the whole process, the toolbox ICC is modified according to recommendations resulting from applications (in the 4 case study and 8 reference cities) and suggestions from external sources (e.g. external researchers, external practitioners and the public).